Stronger.

Holding the jar of marble balls, Arthur stood at the door reaching a conclusion in his plan.

"Here it goes..."

He opened the lid of the jar and bend down before tossing all the marble balls out onto the floor.

"Clink! Clink! Clink!"

The noise they made by falling on the floor disturbed the zombies from their feast as they turned around to look behind.

Arthur remained standing there and raised his hand, showing them a peace symbol with his fingers.

"Grrrrr!!"

The zombies who were fighting among themselves to share the only body got excited when another prey came infront of them.

Out of the remaining 6 zombies, 4 of them stood up moving toward Arthur while the rest continued feasting on the corpse.

The moment the four zombies started walking toward Arthur, they came across the several marble balls fallen on the floor and stupidly stepped on them.

"Thud!"x4

And the result was obvious as all of them slipped down without fail.

"Well well would you look at that."

Spinning his spear in his hand, Arthur grinned and strolled into the room, not putting his feet anywhere near the marble balls.

He walked forward in a laid back manner, approaching the fallen zombies and stabbing his spear right into their heads.

"One...two...three.....and there goes four..."

He killed all four of them rapidly as even when one got up, it would slip back again after stepping on a marble stone.

The remaining two zombies finally got up after finishing their feast and started to move toward Arthur but sadly they also stepped on the marble balls just like their peers and fell down.

With two swings, Arthur took their lives and only one human stood alone inside the room now.

Glancing at the dead corpse of the man who had shouted out, Arthur shook his head and walked toward it.

"Sorry mate I couldn't save you, but atleast I wont let you walk around aimlessly and let you rest in peace..."

Raising his spear, he gave a sad smile and brought it down, stabbing it into the corpse's head.

Now he won't be able to turn into a zombie and walk around searching other targets for food.

"Sigh~"

Arthur sighed in slight tiredness and walked back to the corridor.

Not forgetting the reason he was killing all of them, he digged into the three zombies chest and took out their mana stones.

Coming back inside, he started to dig into all of the zombie's chests and took out their mana stones excluding the man who got recently killed and couldn't turn into a complete zombie, making him have no mana stone.

"And that's a total of 11 mana stones I have here...."

Arthur muttered as he recalled the information for evolving from his nightmares.

There were several ways a being could advance from the zero order to the first order but the most basic one of the way was to eat mana stones. 

People with great potential would easily advance with only a few mana stones while people with poor potential would take hundreds of mana stones to evolve.

The quality and quantity of the mana stones also greatly affected the rate for advancing.

Also, beings at the second order would not be able to advance if they eat mana stones of the first order as there won't be any energy in it that would help them get stronger.

The mana stones that Arthur had been eating all this while were from the beings at the zero order, and if he had eaten a mana stone of a first order, then he could've gotten a lot stronger.

"Even if I want to eat the mana stones of the first order, I cant do that now as they're more than enough to kill a hundred men of the army....."

Arthur muttered as he glanced at the many mana stones in the pocket in his pants.

"Well, let's try to get as much as mana stones I can from this building."

He went to the door and took the glass jar before picking all the marble stones lying on the floor and putting then inside it.

"I can do this all day..."

Keeping the jar in his backpack, he searched around the room of the dead guy for anything useful and kept it in his pockets.

Moving out of the room, Arthur explored the whole first floor and found another two zombies in different rooms and took their lives and their mana stones.

There were a total of eight rooms on every floor. On the first floor, he had killed six zombies.

And on the second floor, he killed two zombies and lastly on the first floor he killed eleven zombies, making it a total of nineteen dead peple from the whole building.

Arthur walked back toward his room deciding to absorb all the mana stones, and then go outside of the building when he was much stronger.

He entered his room and removed his clothes, getting a bit comfortable and ate something for his hungry stomach.

After he felt relaxed, he took out the mana stones from his pants pocket and started to clean all of the them.

Then he sat on the floor of his room and started to eat the man stones one by one.

"BOOM!"

It felt like an atomic bomb exploded inside him after all of the 13 mana stones went inside his stomach.

"AAGHHH!!!"

He grit his teeth hard as painful tremors occurred inside his body and his skin started to crawl dangerously.

Only after a few minutes of the torture did the pain slightly ease back and his mind returned to concentrate on the energy inside his body.

A lot of dirty black sweat came out of his pores and he started to feel the strength of his body soaring.

"Haaa....."

Arthur opened his eyes letting out a exhausted sigh.

"Fuck, it felt like I was about to die there...."

He stood up feeling his body sticky with all the waste released from his body.

Not wasting any time, he quickly moved to the washroom and took a refreshing bath for half an hour, cleaning every part of his body before coming out all neat.

"Looks like I got a lot stronger than before."

He tightened his body making his muscles hard and robust.

The power of all those thirteen mana stones made a lot of change in his body as he could feel a lot of strength and power in the various parts of his body.

"But it seems my potential is not that good and I'll be needing a lot more mana stones to evolve to the first grade."

He muttered and thought of going out and collecting more mana stones for advancing to the first order.

"There's no time to waste."

Says the man who wasted half an hour in the washroom, but there was nothing he could do as the black sweat was really strange and mostly unhealthy as it was the waste particles present in the body.

Arthur quickly wore back his clothes and prepared to go down again.

This time he was planning to go out of the building to collect lots of mana stones and meanwhile also survey the area for any survivors.